Keep American Legion Post 53 Alive
I am the 3rd Vice In Charge Of This Project For The Harold W. Hyland American Legion Post 53 here in Hemet, Ca. We have been a fixture in this community for decades. Our post is a historical building. It was originally the USO club which hosted many stars in the 30's and 40's to our service men and woman at March Air Force Base. The addition was the mess hall at Camp Haun which fed POW's. The American Legion purchased the buildings for the sum of $1.00. A group of our members tore both buildings down, loaded them on a flat bed and brought them to our present location. That same group rebuilt our current post into what it is today. Our group moved into the post after meeting wherever they could for many years. And here we are today. Our name sake; "Harold W Hyland" was sent to France where he was killed. In his honor we named the post after him.
Our American Legion Family is comprised of 4 groups. We have the Legionaires, the Women's Auxilliary, the Chapter 53 Riders, and the Son's Of the Legion. Since that day we have helped many hundreds of Veterans, their wives and familys. We also sponsor many community groups such as the Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, ROTC, Boy's State, Girls State, Native Americans, Sons Of Italy, TOPS. We also offer our post for rent for other groups and the public.
We are a dry post, in other words we don't serve Alcohol. Unlike other "wet" posts, that have a bar that is the main source of income, we don't. But a bar is a major drawing source of people. We don't have that.
We provide a once a month Breakast open to the community, We have Bingo games once a week which again is attended by our older friends of the community. This is our main source of income. We used to have over a hundred patons attend those games. Now we have 60 people on a good day. Sadly our aging membership is declining at they go to be with the lord. We are having a hard time recruiting younger members from the our armed forces veterans that are getting out of the service now. We need to have help to keep the post open. This is a old post and we need repairs done to maintain a safe and fun place. We have many wonderful members that spend countless hours of their own time to help.
How will the money be used? We need to update our post with a new and modern kitchen. We need to update our Lighting, our flooring needs to be redone. Thankfully our post was built with very good seasoned red wood and is solid as a rock. We do need to have our building patched and painted. We are trying to replace our old outside lighting system with a new more modern and more cost effective system. We have old air conditioners and with our big building it gets to be expensive. We want to be able to upgrade to a more cost efficent system. We need money to upgrade our post in order to provide a more family type post where veterans can bring their family and we can provide a place where their kids can have a monitiored play ground to play in while their parents are playing Bingo or attending any thing else that is going on. We have had to put $15,000 this year into a major sewer upgrade and replace all of the old plumbing systems in the building. Our insurance for such a large post is very expensive and also hits us hard. We have to figure ways to be able to provide more for the community which we have in the works. But it costs money to not only plan but also to operate, we have monthly expenses that need to be meant.
We need funds now in order to start work on those afore mentioned items.
It would be wonderful if we could draw in more Veterans and turn this post into a place where Veterans and the community could come and attend different functions. I have many ideas that i have yet to present to our post but we need to get to work on the required issues within out walls. We would be so grateful for any donations we could get. Our Vets would thank you for any help you could give us.
